E/A Major 1
The objective of my major task was to create emotionally contrasting musique concrete.
A well known composer I was inspired by for this was Pierre Schaeffer with Etude Noire. I enjoyed the way there were samples of typical chords that you can imagine conveying certain moods, then industrial sounds underneath with repetition. There were parts of quite smooth atmospheric noises, then suddenly a more prominent gritty or mechanical noise would enter. In my piece, I have taken this on and used the children in the school yard and rain as the emotions, with the drills, bomb and thunder as the contrasting non emotional sounds. My piece conveys aspects of life such as childhood, working, war and horror, nature, memories and anything else one would perceive from my piece in their own way regarding these.
Audio techniques I applied were layering, bouncing/triggering sounds off of one another by introducing them immediately after another in contrast, pan, volume control/fading and reverb.
A musical technique I learned through doing this was to mix completely different sounds together that can still create a certain feel or story, which sparks off the brain into thinking what the purpose behind it is, or how it makes one feel through the contrasts.
This is an example of practice as research because I have gained ideas from composers from all of my tasks so far to be able to think about their ideas and form my own, such as what sounds Schaeffer used, the way he structured them and how it made me feel listening to it, so I could make this piece which reflects my ideas from him so far, but in my own way.
If I am to evaluate myself, I would give this piece a good mark as it can chill me to listen to with the contrasting sounds and moody atmosphere, which is made more effective with my use of panning, fading and sudden cutting in and out of sounds.
Pierre Schaeffer (1990) Etude Noire, France: INA-GRM. ina c 1006-09. CD, 3:58
